Word: styluses
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Late last year I watched in amazement as my mother took up Graffiti. (I'm talking about the system of entering text on digital organizers made by Palm, Handspring and Sony; she hasn't started spray-painting walls just yet.) Using a stylus on the screen, you are required to write characters the Graffiti way--an A without the horizontal line, and so on. It can be a daunting thing to learn, yet after watching my techno-challenged mom scribble happily on her new Handspring Visor, I felt certain it was the alphabet of the future...
...Instant Tablet. The whole thing is about the size of a thick legal pad, weighs under 3 lbs. and sits comfortably on your thigh. It doesn't get hot, and you can rest your wrist and arm on the screen without messing up your work. That's because the stylus that operates the thing works by constantly beaming low-frequency radio signals to the computer, telling where it is. That way, Windows knows where you want the cursor to be even before you touch the screen. Once you do put pen to virtual paper, a pressure sensor starts the flow...
...with global capability, working in most cities throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas. The device comes with a GSM-based phone, Web browser, e-mail and a plethora of PDA features. Samsung's SPH-I300 ($500), also due out in August, sports a Palm OS with color screen and stylus. It's nearly as light as and more user-friendly than the Accompli, but its CDMA-based cell phone works only...
...creating special 3-D images of the museum's Chinese teapot collection via laser photography. The pots can then be "touched" by anyone, anywhere - as long as they have some fancy (and still fairly bulky) equipment like the Phantom, produced by SensAble Technologies Inc. of Woburn, Massachusetts. A stylus attached to the desktop device transmits force feedback to the user's fingertips. Following a model on your computer screen, you run the stylus over the "body" of the virtual teapot in the air and feel its curved, slick exterior. Move upward and you sense the contour...
...Handspring Edge ($399), while nearly as small as the Vx, felt cheap. The stylus clips to the side in a way that seems vulnerable; it should be stored inside, where God intended your stylus to be. Harder to dismiss is the long-awaited m505 ($449) from Palm. Unlike my increasingly wimpy Vx, this baby offers a full-color display. But when I downloaded a few older color applications from the Net, they wouldn't run on the m505; apparently, its new operating system, Palm OS 4, didn't recognize them. Major points off for that...